Help:Citing sources
Citing sources is important to the reliability of the information present in this wiki because it enables each statement's truthfulness and accuracy to be verified. It also allows the reader to use the wiki as a searchable, cross-referenced index and encyclopedia to the vast collection of source material that makes up the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting. General citation format for books Although it is possible to cite other sources, the majority of citations will concern books (for sources containing multiple articles by a number of authors, see the section below on articles). A set of citation templates based on the template are available. If you find that a citation template for the book you wish to cite does not exist, see Template:Cite book for guidance on how to create it, or ask a fellow editor for assistance. Citation without a page number Written as: Appears as: Citation with a single page number Written as: Appears as: Citation with a page range These are usually used where the text to be cited spans a page division. It should not be used to provide a vague area of a book spanning many pages on which to cite a statement. Written as: Appears as: Citation with a page combination Comma-separate your list of page numbers. This should only be used where it is immediately obvious how the individual pages relate to one another. If this is not clear, you should consider using individual citations instead. Appears as: Page numbers not appearing If you find that the page numbers don't appear as part of your citation, despite following the instructions above carefully, the citation template you are using is probably flawed. Compare it with other citation templates and see if you can spot an error yourself, or report it to an administrator if you feel you need help. General citation format for multi-article books Sometimes a book contains multiple, distinct articles by varying authors (as is the case for Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes). For these instances, the template exists. Citation without a page number The template format allows for two page numbers to be entered: one for determining the author and article title, and the other to be displayed. To cite a book with multiple articles in general, without specifying a page, follow the directions on the template's page. Citations with a page number There should be a sub-template for each issue, which already includes all the necessary parser functions to determine the author and article title by the page number entered. These are generally created by an admin at the time of the book's release. If one does not exist, you can examine other sub-templates and replicate them, or simply notify an admin, who will take care of this for you. Written as: Appears as: Citations with a page range or page combination Like pageless citations (see above), these entries can be made by listing the page range as the displayed pages, using only a single page from within this range for the calculations. If the pages in question come from different articles, whether by the same or different authors, separate citations should be used. General citation format for online sources With the high accessibility of online information regarding the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting from setting creators, either on blogs or messageboards, web references are also common. Because websites are generally not referenced multiple times throughout the wiki, use the template to cite these sources. You can find directions for using this template at Template:Cite web, or ask a fellow editor for assistance. Article-wide citations This type of citation involves providing a single reference for the entire article. This is only suitable for articles where all of the text can be attributed to a single, continuous section of source material. If this is the case, you can make a citation in the references section of the article, which should come towards the end, although before any external links. References * Using ref tags To accurately cite an article, which applies unless all of the text can be attributed to a single continuous passage in the source material, you can use tags. General format In general, you will use the citation templates discussed above, enclosed within the tags, and positioned in the exact location where the citation should be positioned. For example: Goblins have a racial fear of horses. Appears as: Goblins have a racial fear of horses. The wiki will take care of numbering for you. The exact number applied to each citation is not important, merely that the citation number relates to the correct source in the references section. When using citations in this format, you must add a special tag in the References section of the article which informs the wiki where to display the citation details. Although you can use the tag for this, it is recommended you use the template, which takes care of extra formatting details for you: References For an example of how this will appear, please see the end of this article. Reference names Give each reference a sensible name. In the example above, the cited book was [Monsters Revisited, the cited page was 18, and the name of the reference was CMR-p18, a combination of book acronym and page number. If you wanted to use the same book and page number later in the article to cite another statement, you could write it in shortened format: Note that this will only work if the full citation appears before any shortened ones, although you can use the shortened format many times in one article if necessary. Section-wide citations If an entire section of an article can be attributed to one continuous passage in the source material, it is sufficient to provide a citation at the end of the section. It is assumed that all text in the section is cited by the reference provided. Divided citations Should you add a sentence in the middle of two others which are from the same source while your source differs from the other two, the original citation should be replicated for both original statements, since it would be unclear that the first statement was from the same source as the third. For example: Before your edit: :Statement A :Statement B ::citation for both A & B After your edit: :Statement A ::citation for A :Statement C ::citation for C :Statement B ::citation for B Individual citations Most articles will contain references to more than one (and often many) sourcebooks or novels and mostly, the statements in the article are not ordered by source. Each significant statement should have a citation attached, so that the reader is able to find out exactly which book and which page number to view in order to check the statement, or to find out more on the subject. For an example of an article that is comprehensively cited as of June 9, 2008, please see Abadar. Each statement can be attributed to a certain page in a specific sourcebook. Rationale for providing page numbers On other wikis such as Wikipedia, it is sufficient to provide the details of the book without the page number. The reason for providing page numbers on this wiki is so that the viewer can determine exactly where in a book to start reading. It would be unreasonable to expect a viewer to read through an entire sourcebook in an attempt to find the reference to the statement they are looking for, especially since we as editors are easily able to provide specific page numbers. Also, it is a useful GM tool to be able to use the references section of an article to create a set of bookmarks in specific sourcebooks which she can then read later on, in order to gain the most information possible on a subject. Test references Citing sources